Let’s face it, playing a Fighter level after level can get a little boring. A good DM will include some pretty interesting magical items, but aside from that it’s likely that your strategy in battle tends to be “attack the nearest enemy.” A few things have been tried in the history of D&D to make the Fighter a little more interesting and give players something to look forward to.

The Cyclopedia’s Fighter Combat Options seem to have been a combined attempt at codifying the kinds of maneuvers that characters can make in a board game-like battle, and to give fighters a couple of extra moves so they can do something besides roll 1d20 in a fight.

Upon reaching 9th level, a Neutral traveling fighter may elect to become a Ranger. The following requirements must be met:

The character must live in a wild location. Rangers do not live in cities and they rarely visit them. Rangers will occasionally pay visits to the nearby village for supplies and to sell furs, or whatever necessary to maintain contact with rural humans. Rangers must do whatever they can to protect their chosen homeland and the people that live there.

If the ranger’s Wisdom score is 13, or greater, the character can cast druid spells as if he were a druid of one-third his actual experience level (round any fractions down); if a fighter becomes a ranger right at 9th level, he’ll immediately gain the spells of a 3rd level druid. A 17th level ranger can cast spells as if he were a 5th level druid.

A ranger may only travel with a number of hirelings equal to, or less than, his druid level. In other words, if he can cast spells as a 5th level druid, he can have five hirelings accompany him.

Rangers can Move Silently and Hide in Shadows as a thief of one-third his actual experience level (round any fractions down.) Rangers can also Find and Remove Traps as a thief of one-third his actual experience level, but only in a woodland environment.

This is based on the idea that players and the DM will build characters for a story line, not just to suit their gaming needs. In other words, characters should have some panache or style of their own. This means the items below are not rules but rather suggestions on how one might play his own character. The player should be able to freely choose to do this, these are not rule changes. The DM may want to offer “rewards” (some are described below, if you look closely). These rewards are not experience rewards, etc. but instead take the form of some sort of reward in the story, or “good luck.” For example, one reward for being an elf and not using your power to the fullest potential (as a ranger) is that you always seem to find food in the wilderness, you are able to befriend animals more easily (not attacked by bears), and you have a faithful pet (such as a dire wolf). And such rewards can increase as you go up level, because it’s one thing to start out as a “ranger” and then not keep up with it, but someone who has been a ranger for 9 levels should at least have a dire wolf to help him. Again, this is not a rule change.